The contentious public hearing is one of my favorite genres of news stories.

It's absolutely bonkers that this book is still in print. I promise you, douching with vinegar is definitely not a good way to guarantee a girl. It IS a good way to mess up your vaginal microbiome, though!

I have more that one friend right now convinced they have "mold toxicity." The influence of the black mold truthers is real unherd.com/2025/10/meet...

LaGuardia down to a single taxi runway today thanks to the shutdown. At 9:30 am flights are already backed up

A surprising upside to Taylor Swift's very mid new album: Galvanizing thousands of extremely online Swifties to campaign against the use of generative AI for creative work.

This is why AI poses a threat to the medical profession. Not that it can offer anything a doctor can't (at least not right now)! www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Bought the iPhone air in gold, was convinced they accidentally sent me a white phone and convinced them to send me a new one ... it turns out that the gold phone really is just .... white? very confused!

Not every day a skin cell is turned into viable egg! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Many thanks to @kristenvbrown.bsky.social for speaking to our community about "Communicating Science to the Masses" an important and relevant topic!

Apparently the pioneers of IVF had a ghostwriter write their memoir … and he embellished quite a bit. The book came out at a time IVF faced international scrutiny, and really leaned into the narrative of scientists on a quest to end suffering www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ivf-...

On an AA plane bound for Chicago, grounded for over an hour at LaGuardia. Stewardess tells me all flights are grounded due to a computer issue. Didn’t this happen to AA just a few months ago?

Extremely relieved to find that I am still a Pisces, which is way too big a part of my personal identity www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

My family went to the dentist in Mexico growing up, and honestly that was the best dentist I ever had www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I recall the story of Dr. Thomas C. Rainbow, who in mid 1984 wrote an article for Isaac Asimov's magazine about how the current generation could live forever due to medical advancements expected in the next 20 years. The December issue contained his obituary.

"All of us are in a time and place where we will be immortal." If immortality means reincarnation as AI, count me out! @katie-drummond.bsky.social presses the (still mortal!) Bryan Johnson on his plans to live forever www.wired.com/story/big-in...

When I took a break from drinking last fall, I realized that even as an occasional drinker, alcohol played a huge role in my life. Many of my close friendships were forged with the help of booze, as was my marriage. I missed the serendipity and mischief that can come along with a few glasses of wine

This is what we all need and want though! www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/d...

Yet again, the genome proves to be more complex than we'd ever imagined www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cookies is my family's love language and I only kicked my own sugar habit in my twenties when I lived in a country where I found all the desserts entirely disappointing. This @caity.bsky.social is a masterpiece and also entirely relatable

Worth noting: IVM has been around for a long time. Since the 90s! But the economics of the fertility industry (little federal research funding, PE-backed clinics, etc) has made it hard for anything that doesn't increase success rates (or revenue) to get funding.

New scientific techniques are raising the possibility that an alternative to IVF could free thousands of aspiring mothers from brutal protocols, @kristenvbrown.bsky.social reports.

IVF has gotten a lot better since the first IVF baby was born in 1978. What hasn't gotten better? How hard it is on women. But that could soon change. My story on how: www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

I guess I have to watch The Brutalist now www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/m...

I hear a lot about IVF success rates for certain groups needing to improve but the reality is if you don’t have good eggs, IVF is not going to work no matter how good it is (with your own eggs anyway). In other words, there isn’t actually much room for improvement. msmagazine.com/2025/01/16/i...

@nancywalecki.bsky.social lost her neighbor to the Palisades Fire, she writes. He made her childhood neighborhood magical—now both are gone.

Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta's content moderation teams in California will relocate to Texas to reduce bias. In practice, the announcement appears to be more posturing than actual practice: www.wired.com/story/not-ma...

My favorite thing about this is that the husband knows his wife loves an AI, and is totally cool with it...

I've written a lot about polygenic risk scores in DNA testing, which, for at least the time being, are regarded as largely unhelpful (at best). That's because these tests analyze many genes to predict risk of a condition. With our current knowledge of the genome, that's just tough to do.

It should not be understated that it is extremely weird that we know nothing about them

Christopher Gatlin spent 16 months in jail after being charged with assault in St. Louis. Another incident of police relying too heavily on facial recognition tech: www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...

As health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could try to sidestep politics and start a new alcohol temperance movement.

"Today’s temperance is focused on the transformation of self." www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

Maybe my first encounter with an exclamation point in a scientific publication

What really went wrong for 23andMe? There's no smart pivot that can get around the fact that the genome just hasn't turned out to be the useful or interesting to the average person (at least not yet). www.msn.com/en-us/money/...

The fact that your location data is being sold not necessarily by individual apps but being obtained by companies through the bidding process to place ads is not widely understood but so important: www.404media.co/candy-crush-...

This bit from @dkthomp.bsky.social's latest Atlantic cover story really resonated. My habits have definitely changed since the pandemic: More often I eat at home, watch movies at home and even socialize at home, inviting people over in lieu of going out. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

In which I reveal a deep dark secret: I am obsessed with the phone version of Ticket to Ride

My mom used ChatGPT to help buy presents this year. The prompt: poetry books for a nearly 40 female journalist. Here’s what it came up with:

Still genuinely mind boggling to me that consumer testing companies convinced so many people to pay THE COMPANIES to give away their data

I wrote about something dear to my heart and not at all on my beat: tortillas. The art will make you hungry. www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

Most American tortillas taste like cardboard. Chefs, restaurants, and companies are trying to restore the corny glory, @kristenvbrown.bsky.social reports:

Great @virginiahughes.bsky.social story in @nytimes.com on a woman w/an autosomal dominant allele that causes frontotemporal dementia in middle age. Her mother & grandmother had it; she & her 2 sisters carry it. But she's helping research on it Best of luck to her! www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/h...

Fun fact: The doctor in this scandal was Pedro Pascal's dad www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202... people.com/all-about-pe...

this big bloomberg investigation into the global supply chain for human eggs is incredible, and this scene about a fertility drug purified from the urine of postmenopausal women is especially wild www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

I got to write about my favorite subject, which is obviously cats

Somehow this is the most Orange County thing of all abc7.com/post/costa-m...

It was probably inevitable that a DNA testing company would have to enter into a free fall before there was real talk about the risks of sharing DNA data in the consumer market…

@kristenvbrown.bsky.social has spent nearly a decade reporting on consumer-DNA-testing companies and has recently written about the risks of sharing your data with genetic-testing companies. She’s answering all of your questions in r/health on Reddit now: bit.ly/41q2Kx7

I'm a frequent Googler of bodily symptoms. Noticing that often I can't find the information in Google's AI Overview in any of the links it cites as the source of that information. Sometimes the answer it gives me seems to be the answer I was hoping for back up by nothing. That seems ... not good!

Tomorrow: AMA about sharing your DNA data. R/health at 1pm EST. Bonus points if you can read my handwriting.